Cuba. Music. Love. Theft.

“Julie Trimingham’s impressive debut novel unfolds like a fever dream. Written with sensual and
intoxicating prose, Mockingbird is an original love story that may linger with you long after you
close this slender book.”

“Julie Trimingham’s Mockingbird is a terrific read that will leave you questioning right and
wrong, and the bond between mother and child. Trimingham’s observations—of Havana’s
corroded beauty, of a lover who can’t love, of a baby’s easy joy—are not just exact but piercing.
Literary yet fast-paced, electric yet refined, this is a hurricane of a book, by an author to keep
on watching.”

“A novel of quiet passion and rare beauty, Mockingbird is a testament to the power of pure,
uncluttered language—a confluence of feelings and physicality that will draw you back, line after
graceful, memorable, line.”

—Gina Nahai, author of Caspian Rain and Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith

“Julie Trimingham’s Mockingbird is a novel teeming with yearning, with the indescribable smells and tastes of Cuban ardor. This tale of passion and its smudged fate, its undeniable allure, intensifies with each improvised move, so that readers have to gasp for breath, yet cannot help but follow this impossible seduction, and the center of gravity that shapes the beauty known as longing.”

When a wandering tourist in Cuba comes upon a baby abandoned in a car in the blistering sun, her life of ennui is upended. Beautifully written, Trimingham’s poetic soul shines in this impressionistic novel that reveals those metaphoric meanings that reside at the edges of our lives. I loved this book.

I’ve never been to Cuba, but I could see it, hear it, smell it, taste it and feel it in this lyrical novel. It’s a book that is quite literally and literarily sensual . But as much as this is a story of place, it’s also a story of longing and identity, of relationship and of the conflict of one’s own desires and values. Like the very best of novelists, Trimingham takes us outside of ourselves to explore life’s most persistent questions.